Jane Packer obituary

Jane Packer in 1986, the year she provided flowers for the wedding of the Duke of York and Sarah Ferguson. Photograph: Rex Features/Peter Brooker

Jane Packer earned her first wage as a schoolgirl from a Saturday job in a local florist's shop, and spent most of it on flowers to take home; by her death, at 52, she had structured her private realm of the senses into an international brand. Nobody can put a logo on a rose, of course, but a Jane Packer trademark black bag promised bouquets with aesthetic in common, whether delivered in London, New York, Tokyo or Seoul.

Packer was an Essex girl (before that was a brand, too), from Chadwell St Mary, where her carpenter father was a passionate gardener. Her Saturday gig expanded to all her holidays, and then to a full-time job, supplemented by a City & Guilds course one day a week at Southwark College, London. This hardly sounds a radical career path, but it was bold in England in the 1970s. Florists (she recalled most of them as genteel "little old ladies") supplied for presentation or decoration unmixed dozens of what was in season in UK fields or Dutch greenhouses, while a few grand survivors from the Constance Spry era, notably the partnership of Lady Pulbrook and Rosamund Gould, sourced plants from stately gardens as well as Covent Garden.

Pulbrook and Gould's imaginative apprentice Kenneth Turner, who opened a Mayfair shop in 1970 unlike anything else in Europe, was Packer's hero, a standard to aim for through training spent mostly "putting foliage in water," she recalled. Her own first London job at 18 was doing the flowers in a Charing Cross hotel (where her wages were £15 a week and commuting costs £14.50). There, in a time of low budgets, she raided its kitchens for fruit and vegetables to augment the displays, after the manner of 17th-century still lifes. If it looked good, she would use it, even a carrot or a weed.

But only by temporarily leaving floristry to work in fashion, in a knitwear company, where she met graphic designers and photographers, did Packer realise the potential of flowers if differently approached – as both an origin and an extension of clothes and interior design. She was 22 in 1981, still naive, when she signed a 25-year lease on a shop in James Street, just off Oxford Street, in central London, along what was then a smart rat-run, South Molton Street to St Christopher's Place.

It was a sentence to seven-days-a-week hard labour and heavy lifting, buying at Nine Elms market long before dawn, loading and unloading her van. "I remember getting back to the shop one morning, sitting down and bursting into tears because I was so exhausted," she told the journalist Alex McRae. "But then I opened up a box of flowers, and the fragrance floated into the air. And I thought: this is why I do it." There followed three years without profits and five without a holiday.

For lack of a budget to promote herself, and knowing from her fashion foray how the system worked, she went round the receptions of glossy magazines distributing bouquets in lieu of PR. These were intriguing enough to bring her commissions for photoshoots, then restaurants, then an order for the 1986 wedding of Sarah Ferguson and the Duke of York. Those inauspicious flowers were relatively conventional, though, not just because of House of Windsor tastes, but because there were limits on what grew where and when (as Packer pointed out, "the blooms that you saw then were not that wonderful").

Like her Parisian contemporary, Christian Tortu, she circumvented restrictions by not regarding flowers as simply luxuries in themselves – Tortu once said he was a democrat, and an orchid and a blade of grass had equal value in his eyes – but as details to be collaged together, raw materials like textiles, or her father's timber.

In the 1980s, wholesalers began to oblige by importing unusual blooms that seemed to have been doodled by graphic designers rather than bred by horticulturists – gerberas, spider chrysanthemums, ginger flowers, parrot tulips with ruched edges; and by the 1990s, global trade agreements and easier air cargo transport for perishables extended floriculture worldwide. No flower was ever out of season somewhere (Kenya and Colombia led the fields), and new varieties and more improbable colours arrived every year.

Packer let the novel wonders suggest what she created, but began to think of her creations as fashion collections, a regular change of specific ideas that would be immediately recognised as hers, although they were arranged by different employees – these included a half-open hatbox spilling roses, and muddy rubber boots as a container for branches of flowering cherry. Nevertheless, it was not easy to unify the work of all those hands: "It's not like manufacturing a number of identical dresses in London and distributing them."

Her relationship with fashion was often explicit, with flowers for Vogue, Armani and Kate Moss, and as a fashion leader, she was copied by supermarkets and by every local stall hand-tying its bunches in raffia. The international trade press noticed Packer's work, and florists from all over visited the shop, which eventually moved to Marylebone, where it remains. They pleaded for training, floristry being a craft learned by practice, so she opened a school in 1989 in the basement of her family home in Maida Vale.

She later transferred the school to the back of the shop. Many students were Japanese, and Packer replied yes, thank you, when invited to open a school in Tokyo, then a shop; in Seoul, the shop preceded the school; in New York, the shop is by the Queensboro bridge, which, she said, was a thrill for a girl from Essex, and another step towards her idea: "We consider ourselves a brand ... the same as, say, Tiffany or Gucci. If something arrives in a Tiffany box or a Gucci bag, you know someone's gone the extra mile."

Jane Packer was not a brand for snobs. She produced regular how-to-do-it books, designed for Selfridges, Debenhams, Marks & Spencer and John Lewis, and added vases, scented candles and perfumes (with black tulip-shaped stoppers) to the range.

Packer was proud that she had her own tulip, a pointy-petalled flaming lily developed by Vanderschoot in the Netherlands, and proud of her Prince Philip Medal, a personal award in 2005 from the Duke of Edinburgh to a City & Guilds student made good (she only wished she had had more higher education). She also went on frequent lecture tours, slipping away in Japan to take photo-notes of local details – a rambutan fruit projecting its green spikes of rind from a brown paper bag; the blossom season frothing over a cityscape.

She suffered from the effects of a stroke in February 2010 until her death. Her husband, Gary Wallis, a co-founder of the business who remains its CEO, survives her, together with their son Rebby and daughter Lola.

• Jane Packer, florist and businesswoman, born 22 September 1959; died 9 November 2011

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